MarkDrago.com

So, I’m not exactly sure how to deal with the bastard mood that I’m in. I’ve just been very short with people lately. I went off on the news media again the other night. I think it’s easier for people to hear me say that I don’t care about Terri Schiavo now because she’s dead. When I say that I don’t care that Natalee Holloway is missing in Aruba or that I don’t care that people are getting eaten by sharks they get upset with me. I mean, it’s not like I’m related to anyone that is missing or getting eaten. It’s not even like I know someone who knows someone who is related to someone that is missing or getting eaten. I do feel bad for these people’s families and I do feel bad for those who are missing or were eaten, but it doesn’t need to be on the TV all day. If you look at it one way, it’s pretty sick. The media outlets are only talking about it because they want to sell you newspapers or whatever. They know that you’re going to buy their newspapers or watch their news reports because we actually find this stuff interesting. We are actually entertained when they interview the parents of this poor girl that’s missing in Aruba. And you know what we’re all thinking? We’re thinking, “I wonder how the parents are involved in this thing. I bet the dad had his daughter killed because she found out about he was cheating on mommy.” And you know what? If we found out that that is what really happened, then put it on the news for a few minutes because that’s a good story. There are probably hundreds of different people missing all over America right now, but we’re all supposed to care about this one girl?

Anyway - you probably understand now that I’m in a bastard mood. All of these little things that bothered me before now bother me much more. Well, I guess they don’t bother me any more than they did, but I feel more inclined to talk about how they bother me. I mentioned this to my mom and she said, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” While I think that is sound advice, I feel like all of these small things are ruining everything. For some reason I feel like if the news wasn’t filled with shit like this that it would be showing things that actually might affect those people who are watching it. You know, something educational or revealing; something that gave the citizens of this country more to go on than what letter comes after a politician’s name.

I think I need to take a nap or something. Oh, Jeff is going to swing by my house tomorrow and we’re going to try and do some work on Office Bocce. That should be fun. Also, my work on creating RPMs of Gnome through JHBuild is coming along. It’s not done yet, but I’m getting packages out. I basically just have to figure out what else to do to get all of the packages to install. We’ll see how it goes.

So, I got back from Germany on June 1st and I’m just now getting around to writing about it. I really should have written about it earlier because it would have been easier to remember the details. Regardless, here it goes.

I’ve already written about the plane ride over to Germany and a few other things. So, I suppose I’ll start this list of highlights from when I got off the train. It took me about 45 minutes to find my hotel once I stepped out of the train station. However, the hotel is 5 minutes away from the train station. If I knew where to look I could see it from one of the train station doors. Here’s a picture from the balcony my hotel had in which you can see the train station. The hotel room was pretty nice. The see-through doors in the bathroom were a little weird. So was the toilet with two buttons. I spent the first day tooling around Stuttgart. I enjoyed my first German meal which was a falafal sandwich and chicken wings. I spent a lot of time in the Schlossgarten. It was really great to see how German people live day-to-day. You can’t see that in a museum. I watched some guys play real bocce.

I went to Heidelberg the second day. I wrote about this in a previous post, but I have pictures now. I have one of me walking around Heidelberg with a lemon ice. Once I made my way up to the castle, I was able to take this picture of part of Heidelberg and this picture of part of the castle. There was much more to the castle as you can see in this picture I took from the Philosopher’s Walk.

The third day was when we took the trip to the medieval city of Esslingen. I didn’t take many pictures and the ones I took didn’t come out very well. The fourth day marked the beginning of the GUADEC conference. The conference was really awesome. It really motivated me to get more involved in Gnome. Jeff Waugh gave a talk about trying to get 10% of the desktops in the world running Gnome by 2010. He called it “10×10″. I saw John and met some other people as well. We played some giant chess while John hacked on DBUS.

I left the morning after the conference ended. I had a great time and it was really cool to be so far out of my element. Guadec 7 is going to be in Barcelona. We’ll see where things are a year from now, but I would really like to get out to Guadec again. The Gnome Summit is in Boston this fall and I will most likely be attending that as well. I suppose that about wraps up my post about Germany. All of the pictures that I took and deemed were of good enough quality and relevance are available on my flickr account and are tagged with Germany.

So, today is the last day of Guadec. I’ll be heading home tomorrow. There was a GUADEC party last night that was a blast. I’ve met a lot of people from all around the world. Nokia is giving a talk right now about their involvement with Open Source. It’s very exciting to have a large company like Nokia announce their involvement with the community. I would really like to write more, but I’m trying to pay attention to the talk. I’ll definitely write a bunch when I get home. I’ll be home tomorrow afternoon sometime. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed.

This is post number 2 from Germany. I went to Heidelberg yesterday. They have this big castle there which is conveniently placed at the top of a pretty high hill. The walk up to the castle was pretty brutal. I took a bunch of pictures from the top of the castle that came out pretty nice. I’ll try and post pictures tomorrow when I have access from my laptop. Heidelberg is much more touristy than Stuttgart. They have all these little tourist shops and restaurants. I also walked along the ‘Philosopher’s Walk’ which was pretty nice. It also suffered from being at the top of a steep hill. Well, I guess I was the one who suffered. It’s called the ‘Philospher’s Walk’ because Hegel used to walk along it or something like that. I was cursing him as I was climbing up the thing. I took pictures from there also. There’s a really nice view of the castle from there.

I’m writing this entry from an iMac that is in the internet cafe here. That would normally be fine, except this one has a German keyboard or something. It’s mostlty the same except the ‘Y’ and ‘Z’ keys have switched places. Oh, and there are a few more keys: öä€ß§°. :o)

It hit 38° C in Heidelberg yesterday. That’s like 98° F. In similar news, I’m having a little bit of trouble keeping myself hydrated. I’m drinking a bunch of water, but it took me a little while to figure out that that was the problem.

Stuttgart is so alive with people. There is this main pedestrian-only street called Königstraße which is just bustling with people. There always seems to be some kind of fair going on. I spent a bunch of time in the Schlossgarten (a park similar to Central Park) and there are always people there. On a Thursday afternoon the place was packed with people. Awesome.

Alright, I’m going to head over to where the conference is to catch the bus to Esslingen for a little medieval town action. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures tomorrow.

Well, I made it. I’m posting this from some internet cafe in Stuttgart, Germany. The plane ride was a blast. It was really cool to see what I’m guessing was some part of New York or Long Island from that height in the dark. Each streetlight looked like a christmas tree light. The food they served us on the plane wasn’t that bad. While I was eating I was thinking about how flying is entirely ridiculous. We were never meant to fly. I almost laughed out loud. There I was something like 35000 feet over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean eating some pasta/chicken dish and a brownie. Fuck you nature - we’ll make wings. haha. I woke up over France. Yeah - France is just a bunch of farms. That’s it. I came over here and I looked at it and it’s all farms.

Once I landed in Stuttgart I exchanged my US cash for Euros. It’s a very weird experience to hand a person a bunch of $50 bills and have them hand you four pieces of paper that look fancy, have numbers on them, but don’t really hold any value in your mind. What are these things, fancy receipts or something? I dig that they have 1€ and 2€ coins though. Oh, when I got on the train, some kid sat across from me and he was wearing a shirt that said, “Long Island” on it. Pretty freaking weird.

It’s very weird to go to google and get redirected to www.google.de by the way. I’ve got to remind myself to setup webmail for myself because right now I don’t have a way of checking my email. That wouldn’t be such a problem except that if there’s any news about the conference I’ll be getting it in email. Bah. I took a bunch of pictures already, I’ll try and post them later if I get some access from my laptop. Alright - I’m going to try and find some food that isn’t *wurst. Later.

Alright, I’m leaving for Germany in less than 24 hours. I’m finding that I’m more nervous than I thought I would be. I’m kind of surprised because I don’t get nervous very often. It’s not the flight that’s making me nervous. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s not the flight. I think it’s just that I don’t know so many things about what’s going to happen in the next few days.

It’s going to be good to get away. I think it will be good for me to clear my head for a week or so. I haven’t spent 6 nights in a row in a hotel before. That’s going to be kind of weird. It’s long enough that it might make sense to actually put my clothes in the dresser that they have in the room.

There are a lot of things that I’m looking forward to doing in Germany. It may sound weird, but I’m really looking forward to just walking around the park that is in the middle of Stuttgart. I can’t imagine it being anything too special. I’ve seen trees, grass, and hills before, but these are German trees, grass, and hills.

I’m going to try and post to my blog when I get over there. I’ll probably be posting pictures as well. I’ve got to get to sleep now if I have any hope of falling asleep on the flight and dealing with the 6-hour time difference well. Later.

So, I’m leaving for Germany in just a few days. My plane leaves Wednesday at 9:00pm. I’m very excited and very anxious. I’ve never been on a plane (or even inside of an airport). I’m more scared about the airport than I am about the plane. I keep picturing this scenario where I entirely blunder the process by which I get on the plane and miss it. I know it is very unlikely, but I feel like there are processes in place at the airport that I don’t understand and am likely to mess up. “You can’t say bomb on an airplane.” I’ve got to keep that in mind.

In preparation for my trip I’ve been buying all kinds of things. I bought a new pair of sneakers since my other pair have received their fair amount of trouncing. I like the new ones:

They’re also the first pair of sneakers that I’ve ever seen which have Alkaline Trio lyrics in them.

I’m giving the presentation at the next LILUG meeting. The topic is “Logical Volume Management and Software RAID”. It’s a pretty neat topic for people who are interested in managing their hard drive space in interesting ways. There will be a lot of, “Wow, I didn’t even know that problem was even solvable.” moments during the presentation. That’s what I kept saying to myself when I was first reading up on the topic. It should be fun.

I’m going to try and crash the Silent Majority show at The Downtown tonight. I don’t have tickets, and I’ll probably do anything for them. So, if you have a ticket and you need someone dead or something, get in touch with me. I pretty much need to get in. If I don’t get in, I’m going to be a fair amount of miserable for the rest of the day.

My brother got these ridiculous stress relieving balls that look like breasts. The texture isn’t too bad. I mean, it’s not going to fool anyone, but you’d be hard pressed to find more realistic feeling stress relief balls. Nak, Raghav and Steve were over the other night and we played some poker. After Nak dropped out of the game, he passed out on the couch. I couldn’t resist taking this picture, and I couldn’t resist posting it either. Sorry Nak.

Update: I got into the Silent Majority show and it was entirely awesome. I’ve never seen a crowd go off like that. I hope they were able to raise a bunch of money for James MacCauliffe (I know I just butchered his last name’s spelling). I’m really glad that I was able to be there for the show. I ran into a bunch of people from high school who I hadn’t seen in a while (Matt Tutrone, Melinda, Dave Weck, etc.) It was a good night overall.

Sure, I have plenty of things to talk about, but I might as well start with the most interesting topic. It also happens to be the one topic that I can’t get out of my head. I just figured I’d warn you that this post is going to get more and more boring as it goes along. But, it will hopefully be able to satiate John’s need for input.

I just spoke with Jamie a few hours ago. It’s getting more and more difficult to talk with her. You would think that it would get easier, but it doesn’t. I feel very alone after I speak with her. It’s not the kind of alone that I was prepared for. I mean, I knew she would find someone. And, yeah, that bothers me, but it’s bearable. What I hadn’t prepared for was the loneliness that is resulting from my realization that the Jamie that I dated no longer exists. I don’t know. I guess there is something comforting in knowing that characters from your past still exist. I’m not exactly sure what to do about the current situation. I mean, it’s not my place to really _do_ anything. Besides, I don’t really want to be involved. But, I wish things were working out differently. I apologize for the vagueness of this entry. I just don’t think it fair to really go into detail here. It’s a shame because it’s the details that really hurt.

Moving on. I went to a hardcore show the other day. It was the first one that I had been to in a while. It was nice to go back to one - for many reasons. It’s nice to be around a whole bunch of people who are straight edge. It’s interesting to go from a world where it is so weird to be straight edge to one where it is almost expected. There’s something about hardcore that is different from every other type of music that I’ve come across. It’s not so much about the music, but about the community. There is a real sense of comradery. I think it might be due to the raw emotion that is present in the music. When you see someone put so much emotion into creating (or listening) to music, it can really move you. I’m not saying that this makes it any better than other forms of music, just that I don’t get this kind of feeling from other genres. One of the kids had a shirt on that said, “Suicide Before Betrayal” on it. Now, it was just a t-shirt, but I’ve been thinking about its meaning since I saw it. Why can’t all friendships be that strong. Why does it feel like it’s a common thing to betray someone. I almost got into a fist-fight at the show. That is pretty odd for a few reasons: #1 I don’t get into fights and #2 Who gets into a fight at a hardcore show? Regarding #1, I just don’t ever get into fights. I didn’t get into any fights all through high school or anything like that. With that being said, I’m almost looking forward to getting into a fight. Maybe I just want to feel what it’s like to get punched in the face. Maybe I’ve watched Fight Club a few too many times. Regarding #2, for the most part, hardcore shows are peaceful things. I mean, there’s a lot of rage and emotion, but respect is a major element of the hardcore scene. I don’t really want to get into the “Mark’s mosh etiquette” rant right now, but this guy at the show was being a real dick. Basically, you should only dance with other people that want to dance. All the kids that are standing on the side of the pit don’t really want to dance and they don’t really want to catch your fist in their face. So, keep a respectful distance and everyone will be happy. Well, this guy was swinging his arms and hitting these two girls right on the side of the pit and next to me. So, I pushed him away from the girls. He came back and was swinging his arms again. So, the girls and I pushed him together, except this time he fell over. He got right up in my face and ‘fight mode’ kicked in. All of a sudden there’s a crowd of people around us and we’re staring into each other’s eyes. It was pretty intense. I loved it. Some of his buddies took him outside. His friends told me not to worry about him and that he was just having a bad day or whatever. After a few bands played and a few hours passed, he came over to me and apologized. I thought that was incredibly awesome of him. It must have taken a lot for him to do that and I really appreciate it.

I submitted a patch to sound-juicer. It doesn’t entirely fix gnome bug #153988, but it helps. It basically makes it so you can type a custom genre into sound-juicer before ripping a CD. I think the interface of sound-juicer is very refreshing and is a stellar example of what I like about the feel of Gnome. The CD-ripper is a type of program that everyone loves to throw features and awkward options into. Sound-juicer has resisted this urge and created a program that is just a joy to use. I don’t expect my patch to be accepted, but hopefully someone will find it useful. I know that I’m using it. :o)

This create your likeness as a southpark character thing has been going around the blogs the past few days. I couldn’t help myself. I made two. One of them is me in all of my bald glory and the other one is when I’m wearing my new spiffy EFF hat.

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It’s not easy being the angry son-of-a-bitch that my coworkers claim I am. It is a rarity that anyone sides with me when I get into one of my rants. I suppose that might be because agreeing with me will likely only lengthen the time that I bitch about something. But regardless of the reason it’s difficult to go on complaining when no one agrees with you. Well, I found a post by someone who is very respected in the technology community who actually whole-heartedly agrees with something that I have said. Tim Bray, one of the original editors of the XML specification (amongst many other accomplishments), recently wrote about his dislike for the word ’solution’. To quote his post (which is so short that this quote is like half his post), “This is so freaking retarded, can there be a living human being who believes anyone will be more willing to drop the $450 on their box because it’s described as a ’storage solution’?” That is pretty much my argument as well. When I read something that describes a product as a ’solution’ I feel like someone is trying to push feces down my throat. When someone uses the word ’solution’ I assume that they either think that I am a total idiot or that their product fills no real purpose and thus can only be labelled with the word ’solution’. Everything is a solution. I wouldn’t use the word ’solution’ to describe a product because I wouldn’t want a potential customer to think that I consider them an idiot, and I would rather explain the exact purpose my product serves instead of making it look like it serves no exact purpose at all.

On another note, I’ve been thinking a lot about culture and how much the overall situation really sucks right now. We’re in a quagmire of legality and lawsuits that basically puts a sleeper hold on our culture and allows record companies to own practically everything that is recorded. I wish I had more time to expand on this topic, but if you want to understand how I feel, give this panel discussion with Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Tweety a listen. Brandon describes it as the “shadier side of online piracy” and I can’t disagree more. I believe that what Jeff Tweety and Lawrence Lessig are talking about has very little to do with online piracy and it certainly doesn’t “tell you it’s not so bad”. Lawrence Lessig actually attacks people who pirate music and other content because it muddies the argument. The worldwide discussion about this should not be about online piracy because the cost of music and the availability of it isn’t really the problem. The problem that I see is that the wrong people end up owning copyrights that last nearly forever and it isn’t very easy to build on past art. I personally have stopped downloading music that is not licensed in a way that makes doing so legal. This decision was not an easy one and it is something that everyone has to decide for themselves. I don’t want to push my ideas on anyone. However, while I am actually buying CDs now, I’m also very much in favor of artists using things like the creative commons to license their work in a way that makes the most sense for them both financially and creatively.

I wish I had more time to expand on my ideas. I’m sure I will at some point. But, Nak got tickets to yet another Mets game today and we’re leaving in just a little bit. I took 2 pictures last night that are available on my flickr account. Nak had a great quote last night. After we both finished eating footlong chili dogs he said, “I felt like a porn star eating that thing”. Classic.